If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  “I guess you know my daughter thinks the sun shines out of your neat little backside, Miss Duval?”

  Lally didn’t know what to say or do. Why, in God’s name, hadn’t she listened to Hugo? Why had she exposed herself to this, why had she been so egocentric as to imagine she could do anything to help?

  “Maybe you should leave,” Chris said to Lally. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, getting up and stuffing her shoes back into her bag. “I shouldn’t have barged in this way.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” Andrea said, nastily.

  “That’s enough, Andrea,” Chris said.

  “Is it? Am I embarrassing you, Mr High and Mighty? You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t?”

  “Sure you do, you all do.” She was out of control, close to tears.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Chris said, trying to stay gentle.

  “I don’t want to go upstairs.” Andrea’s voice grew louder with booze and anger. “I’m not some inconvenience to be kept out of the way – I’m your wife, remember? I’m your wife!”

  Chris tried to take her arm again, but she shoved him away harder than the first time. Appalled, Lally took a step forward, then stopped.

  “Mommy, don’t.”

  They all turned. Katy stood in the doorway.

  “Please, Mommy.”

  “Go away, Katy,” Andrea said.

  Katy looked at Lally, then back at her mother. Her eyes were pleading. “Stop it, Mommy, please.”

  “Go to your room, Katy,” Andrea snapped.

  Lally saw the child steel herself, knew how much easier it would have been to do as she was told, to run upstairs and shut herself away, but Katy didn’t budge, just stood there bravely.

  “I want to help you, Mommy,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you when I need your help.”

  “Katy, honey,” Chris said, gently. “Why don’t you go on up?”

  The girl hesitated and then, while Lally held her breath, she walked right up close to her mother. “Mommy, why don’t you come up with me?” She held out her hand.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Andrea kicked out her right foot, and hit Katy’s shin.

  “You stop that!” Whirling around, Chris pushed Andrea against the wall, shocking her fleetingly. Katy burst into anguished tears. Over by the fireplace, Jade sat up and growled softly.

  “Come on, Katy.” Lally stepped forward again, more decisively. “I’ll take you up.”

  “Oh no, you don’t!” Andrea pulled away from Chris and seized Katy’s left arm. “I won’t have you taking over my daughter – ”

  “I wouldn’t dream of taking over,” Lally said incredulously.

  “Oh, no?”

  “Of course not!”

  “That’s why she talks about you night and day – you should hear her, you’d love it.” Andrea let Katy go, turning on Lally, and the child rushed weeping from the room and up the stairs. “I suppose Chris has been telling you all about me.” She came very close, and Lally could feel her warm, liquor breath. “About what a lousy mother I am.”

  “He hasn’t said anything, not a word.”

  “Andrea, for pity’s sake, will you stop this right now?” Chris’s anguish was written all over his face. “I won’t have you subjecting Miss Duval to this kind of abuse.”

  “So it’s Lally to you, and Miss Duval to me.” Andrea’s cheeks were scarlet now, and she was panting with rage. “That just about says it all, doesn’t it?”

  Lally picked up her bag, her hands shaking. “I’m going,” she said to Chris, not looking at his wife. “Please don’t worry about me. As far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

  She started for the door, but Andrea grabbed her wrist.

  “Let me go,” Lally said, coldly.

  “How dare you give me orders.” Her fingers gripped like a painful vice. “This is my house, not yours.”

  “Let her go, Andrea.” Chris stepped between them, and even Andrea saw from the expression on his face that she’d gone too far. “Let her go right now!”

  Andrea released Lally and with a great sobbing moan she ran out of the room. An instant later, they heard the back door slam. Chris sank back down onto the couch and put his head in his hands, and Jade went to him, sat close, leaning against his legs.

  “Will she be okay?” Lally asked, weakly. She felt sick and shaky.

  Chris nodded, his head still down. “She’ll probably stay with the dogs for a while.” His voice was muffled by his hands. “When she gets like this, they’re the only beings she can stand to be with for long.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  He didn’t answer. Lally looked down at him helplessly for a moment, then sat down again, on the edge of an armchair. She felt riddled with guilt, as if her coming to the house had created the ugly scene, though she knew full well that there must have been any number of incidents worse than this one, and that they were the reason she had come in the first place. She thought about poor Katy, all alone upstairs, and how frightened she must be, how humiliated by the public exposure of her mother’s frailty.

  Chris raised his head at last. He looked up at Lally, and there was such a frank sadness in his eyes, and Lally realized then that she was the first outsider to have witnessed this family at its lowest ebb, and it felt a little like being an eye witness to a crime. She couldn’t even try to slip silently away because Andrea Webber had reached out her hand and drawn her right into the messy heart of it. She was involved now, whether she wanted to be or not. She felt it, and she knew Chris Webber felt it too. She had lost her right to walk away. And looking at the man right now, at all that hopelessness laid bare, and then thinking of Katy upstairs in her bedroom, Lally found that she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to walk away.

  For several minutes they sat in silence. From time to time, the dogs in the back yard barked and Jade cocked her head to one side, listening, but staying where she was. Inside the sitting room, the grandfather clock ticked on. Outside, in the street, a neighbour shovelled snow, and the traffic on Route 102 continued its steady flow.

  “I’m so sorry,” Chris said, at last.

  “Not your fault,” Lally said. “I came uninvited. I interfered.”

  “You were a guest.” Chris’s eyes were still pained. “I hope she didn’t hurt you when she grabbed you.”

  “No,” Lally said, though her wrist was still throbbing. “You were right. I didn’t come to talk about shoes or ribbons. I came because of Katy’s bruises. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “Why? I haven’t exactly helped, have I?”

  “I think you’ve helped me reach a decision.” Chris’s jaw was very taut. For a moment, he hesitated, weighing something up. “And now I think I need to ask you for your help, and I have absolutely no right to ask.”

  “More right than I had to come here.” Lally paused. “I’d like to help any way I can.”

  “Do you think you could take Katy home with you – just for an hour or two? Get her out of the house, occupy her while I start trying to unscramble this mess – I know it’s asking too much, but – ”

  “Do you think she’ll want to come with me? I’ll be more than happy to have her, but is it the right thing to do?”

  “I think it is,” Chris said slowly. “It’s time for me to take some action, to work out what I’m going to do about our problems. I think it may be easier if I don’t have to worry about Katy, for just a little while.”

  “All right,” Lally said. “If she agrees.”

  “I’ve kept hoping that I could keep things together, superficially at least.” He shook his head. “But I know it’s gone too far now. I know it’s time. To take care of things.”

  “Of Andrea.”

  He nodded. “She needs help.�
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  Lally bit her lip. “I think Katy’s going to need some help, too.”

  “I know she is.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lally said.

  “Me, too.”

  Chapter Five

  Thursday, January 7th

  Just over one hour after the autopsy into the death of Jack Long – delayed for over three days by an eleven-vehicle pile-up on the Massachusetts Turnpike and a rash of fatal shootings – had been completed at People’s Hospital in Boston, the autopsy on the body of Marie Ferguson began at Chicago’s Memorial Hospital.

  The autopsy room, next to the pathology laboratory, was in the basement, an artificially bright, subterranean world apart from the rest of the hospital. About thirty feet square, it was a cold, cheerless place made out of stone, stainless steel and marble. If a stranger were to enter at a time when the room was in use, he might, for an instant, believe he had entered a regular operating theatre, but though some of the sights and sounds were similar – the gowned and masked men and women, the clatter of instruments, the occasional grating of a bone saw or the buzzing of a drill – he would quickly observe the absence of anaesthetist and nursing staff, the less urgently focused concentration than that of a surgical situation, and the fact that there were four tables instead of one. For the patients who lay on the marble slabs in this room were beyond hope and beyond the help of surgeons.

  It was a quarter after six Thursday evening when the young associate medical examiner completed his external examination, made his first incision and stared intently down into Marie Ferguson’s body.

  “Most of the chest wall has been destroyed.” He spoke, as he worked, into a microphone suspended over the table. “Pieces of skin and subcutaneous tissue are hanging around the left side of the chest wall.”

  All four tables were occupied, and the autopsy room was buzzing with activity, but the pathologist was already wholly engrossed. He wore a mask, gloves, apron and shoe covers over green scrub clothes, and three of his senses, touch, sight and smell, were on full alert.

  “Part of the skin has a blackish colour. Part of the right side of the chest wall has also been destroyed, but there is some normal tissue left in the axilla of the right side. Remnants of a pacemaker are visible. Remnants of pacemaker wires are present.” Picking up a scalpel, the medical examiner bent lower over the patient, sniffing. “There is a smoky odour apparent in all tissues of the chest.”

  The paramedics who had responded to the 911 call at the magnificent house on North Lincoln Square the previous morning had believed, at first glance – as had the first police officers on the scene – that Marie Ferguson had died of a gunshot wound. As the early investigation had begun to unfold, however, and as the victim’s traumatized husband had continued, until medicated into sleep by the attending physician, to protest his innocence, it had become clear that nothing about the case was as it had first appeared.

  The medical examiner’s autopsy protocol confirmed Sean Ferguson’s bewildered, hysterical statement. His wife had not been shot, yet her heart had blown open, her left lung had collapsed and there was blood in the pleural cavity.

  “Cause of death: destruction of the pericardium and the heart muscle,” Commander Isaiah M. Jackson read to Lieutenant Joseph Duval just before eleven that night, from the protocol that had been rushed to his office.

  “And they think it was the pacemaker that caused it?” Joe Duval asked. His grey eyes were keen and puzzled.

  “They seem pretty sure of it.” Jackson played with a gold Cross pen on his desk. He had long, delicate fingers, a tall, athletic body, a strong, seldom humorous face and a gleaming black, entirely bald scalp.

  “Has it ever happened before?” Bending down, Joe peered at the gory evidence packed into two glass jars on the commander’s desk. The containers were tightly sealed, but the office already reeked of formaldehyde.

  “Not so far as they know.” Jackson grimaced. “What a way to go.

  “So it’s accidental death, and we ship this off to the manufacturers?”

  “Who just happen to be Hagen Pacing in Logan Square.” Jackson shook his head. “I knew Mrs Ferguson’s father, William Howe. Hell of a man.”

  “And a powerful family,” Joe commented.

  “You got it. So let’s take care of this fast, Duval.” The commander wrinkled up his nose. “This stuff smells like skunk’s pee.”

  Joe was already at the door.

  “We need the Hagen people to guarantee that this was a one-off,” Jackson stopped him. “Some kind of freak accident.”

  “You think there might be more, Commander?” Joe said.

  “God forbid.”

  Isaiah Jackson waited until Duval had closed his door, and then he sat back in his chair and stared at the jars on his desk. They were making him feel sick to his stomach, and it had nothing much to do with the stink. His own pacemaker had been fitted three years ago, and he had, thank God, never felt better, but still, freak or not, Marie Ferguson’s death made him uneasier than anything else had since a spate of senior police shootings five years before by a demented retired officer.

  Gently, cautiously, he rubbed his chest.

  “Talk about heartburn,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  Thursday, January 7th

  Lally had taken Katy home. The ten-year-old had protested weakly at first, but both Chris and Lally had observed that she was relieved, more than anything, that someone else knew their secret, and that maybe now her mother might let her father give her the help he said she needed.

  They sat for a while at the kitchen table, drinking home-made lemonade and playing with Nijinsky, and then, even though it was dark, they built a snowman in the back yard, before heading into the barn-studio for a little barre practice; and Lally switched on all the lights and put on a Prokofiev tape and they began to improvise, and before long they were both throwing discipline to the wind and releasing all the accumulated tensions in their minds and bodies the best way they knew how.

  Her sudden attack of breathlessness took Lally by surprise.

  “I have to stop,” she gasped, laughing a little and leaning up against one of the wall mirrors. “You’ve run me ragged, Katy Webber – I think I must be getting old.”

  Katy stopped whirling and came to her, concerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Lally said, though she felt oddly exhausted. “But I think maybe I’ve had enough for the moment.”

  She switched off the power and they put on their snow boots and coats and went back to the house, and there was a message on the answer machine from Hugo at the café, wanting her to call, but Lally didn’t feel up to explaining things to Hugo just yet. What they needed, she told Katy, was hot chocolate with marshmallows, and the child, needing to keep busy, helped make the drinks and fussed around her teacher and petted the cat. Neither of them broached the subject of Andrea. Lally knew it would be wrong to question Katy without her father present; her only rights in the whole miserable affair were to see her pupil out of danger. She watched Katy fondling Nikinsky’s ears, listened to her softly humming the Prokofiev, and wondered what was happening at that other house a few miles down the road.

  Chris arrived just after nine that evening. Lally had made supper early, after Hugo had telephoned to say he would be out all night at a friend’s, and then, seeing that Katy was exhausted, Lally had persuaded her to take a nap on her bed, promising to let her know when her father came or called.

  “Come in,” she said, softly.

  He looked haggard and sad, and Lally saw, with new horror, that there were fresh scratches on his right cheek and left hand, but she restrained herself from mentioning them, just invited him to come and sit down by the fire.

  “Katy’s having a sleep,” she told him. “I said I’d wake her when you came.”

  “Would you mind if we left her a while longer?”

  “Of course not. She needs the rest.”

  The sitting room was very hushed.


  “Can I fix you something to eat?”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “It’s all ready – just needs heating up. It’s no trouble, and you look as if you could use something.”

  Chris nodded wearily. “Maybe you’re right.”

  They sat at the big pine table in the kitchen, and Lally set down a dish of chicken casserole and mashed potatoes, and in spite of his misery, Chris found that he was pretty hungry, and Lally, having eaten very little with Katy, joined him and, after just a moment’s hesitation, she opened a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses.

  It was a strange meal. Two virtual strangers, knowing just the bare essentials about each other, the way people did in a small community, their only real common link asleep upstairs. Chris was a married man, the father of a pupil, and there was no real reason for Lally to feel the slightest intimacy with him, and yet she was aware that she did feel that, and that it wasn’t just because of what had happened that afternoon. If it hadn’t been for Andrea’s bizarre attack on her, Chris would probably never have felt able to enlist her help, but sitting there now, watching him eat, feeling his pain, Lally realized, with a pang of guilt, that there was something disturbingly attractive about Chris Webber, and that it bothered her more than a little.

  “Would you mind,” he asked, after a while, “if I talk to you about things?”

  “Not a bit,” she replied. “So long as you don’t feel obligated.”

  “I’d like to talk,” Chris said. “I think I’ve needed to open up – to unload, I guess – for a long time.” He paused. “But I have no right to burden you.”

  “No burden,” Lally said.

  He spoke slowly but candidly, letting it out a little at a time. He was from Philadelphia, but had come north-east on a long painting vacation thirteen years ago and had fallen in love with the Berkshires and with Andrea. They had married within six months and settled in Williamstown, and it had seemed in the early days to be a good, loving marriage of equal minds, until Andrea had started to experience some irrational anxieties about what she regarded as her own inadequacies. No matter how often Chris had tried to reassure her, Andrea felt that she was too inhibited, that she was unpopular, that she was a poor wife. She had never drunk liquor of any kind before, having grown up in a teetotal household, but about a year after marrying Chris, she had taken her first glass of wine at a party, and had become, out of the blue, the life and soul of the evening. Chris had enjoyed watching Andrea’s self-confidence bloom that night, and if she’d stopped there, it might have been okay, but one glass had become two and then three, and then she’d begun experimenting with spirits, and that was when her new-found abandon had turned to aggression.